Marin and Sonoma’s north-south bikeway inches along

Bicyclists in Marin and Sonoma Counties have for decades longed and lobbied for a high-quality, traffic-separated bike path stretching from the Golden Gate Bridge through both counties to the Mendocino line, a Highway 101 for bikes. When complete, the 90-mile bikeway that planners and advocates call the North-South Greenway will serve local riders and commuters as well as the tourists who already ride north from San Francisco in large numbers.

The Sausalito-Mill Valley Pathway, built in the early 1980s through the Richardson Bay marshes along a former rail line, is the most prominent and popular piece of the Greenway up and running so far, busy with people riding and walking year-round. As a rail-trail, this early piece of the North-South Greenway set the pattern. Much of the rest of the route, both existing and planned, uses 19th century railroad routes that follow gentle grades around, over, and occasionally under the North Bay’s many hills. The Cal Park Hill Tunnel, which burrows under a steep hill between Larkspur and San Rafael, opened in 2010, and studies are underway to reopen the Alto Tunnel as a trail between Mill Valley and Corte Madera. Other pieces, including a fix for the dangerously narrow trail bridge over Corte Madera Creek, are gradually progressing through the planning and construction phases, but today much of the route remains hypothetical, without even a timeline for construction. To see the progress of the Greenway, check out this map.

The map’s best evidence of how far the North-South Greenway still has to go is the orange line way out to the west. Bicyclists crossing Marin generally prefer this on-road route, via Fairfax, San Geronimo, and Nicasio, to the North-South Greenway in its current, embryonic form, signed in Marin as Bicycle Route 5. Bicycle Route 5 strings together the already-completed pieces of the Greenway with various connector roads, but the result involves a plethora of turns to negotiate the many gaps and a good deal of traffic as a result.

At their best, long-distance bikeways offer both protection from other traffic and the ease of simply following one route. Drivers expect this as a matter of course. Going by car from the Golden Gate Bridge across Marin and Sonoma is no more difficult than not accidentally getting off the freeway. For people biking, Oregon’s Bear Creek Greenway, which runs 18 miles from Ashland to Central Point with only two at-grade road crossings, is a great example. When the North Bay’s greenway is seamless enough to start enticing long-distance riders over the longer, hillier Nicasio route, we’ll know that it’s made real progress.

SMART, the long-anticipated train that began operating in August between San Rafael and the Sonoma County Airport north of Santa Rosa, had initially promised, as part of its pitch to North Bay voters for sales tax funding, to build a bike and pedestrian path along the entire line. The Marin and Sonoma Bicycle Coalitions both pushed hard for the sales tax vote, as this was supposed to complete much of the North-South Greenway at one stroke. Plagued by funding shortfalls, however, SMART has constructed only a few disconnected bits and pieces, and in 2015 the Marin County Bicycle Coalition threatened legal action if SMART didn’t follow through on the promised pathway.

SMART has mostly focused its bikeway efforts on connections between stations and nearby streets. This is important, of course, but it also illustrates why the North-South Greenway has been such a long time coming. With no single agency in charge, each of the North Bay’s authorities focuses on local priorities—connecting a park to a school here, bridging a creek there. For now the big picture, a unified bikeway that’s safe and convenient to use for both short and long distance travel remains out of reach.